Murder on Black Friday (13 page)

Harry sneered at Nell, but said nothing. A handsome devil, more so than ever with his skin and hair newly gilded by the sun, he sported but two physical imperfections: a small scar that made his left eyelid sag ever so slightly, and a bulge just below the bridge of his nose. The former was dealt to him by Nell, the latter by Will on her behalf; every time the narcissistic Harry Hewitt looked in the mirror, he would be reminded anew how much he loathed his mother’s upstart Irish governess and the elder brother who was presumably courting her. He’d grown a small moustache since she’d last seen him, much like that of Philip Munro in the little portrait Catherine wore around her neck.

A born dandy, the “Beau Brummel of Boston” was as stylishly attired for his cricket match as for any other social engagement. His flannel trousers, shin pads, and shirt were as spotlessly white as if they’d never been worn. In lieu of a belt, he wore a scarf emblazoned with the same blue and yellow stripes as his necktie, jacket, and cap. It was an odd cap, brimless, like a Chinaman’s, and ringed with those gaudy stripes. He undoubtedly thought it quite sporty and dashing, never mind that Nell couldn’t even look at him for fear of laughing in his face.

She was saved from such an outburst by Will, who snatched the cap off Harry’s head and thrust it in his brother’s free hand. “You’ve got the manners of a ditch-digger, Harry.”

Actually, he didn’t, when it suited him. From all accounts, Harry could act the perfect gentleman if he wanted to dazzle some naïve mill girl or smooth-talk the proprietor of a gaming hell into taking his I.O.U.

“What are you two doing here?” Harry asked as he swept his gaze around the room. “Where’s Phil? They’ll be waiting for us up at the Peabody Club.”

Despite the sneer, despite the hat, and most of all despite what he’d done to her—or tried to do—last year, Nell couldn’t suppress a pinch of pity as she watched Harry look around like a puppy searching for his beloved master.He would have barged in through the back door and up the service stairs without so much as a glance in the direction of Mrs. Gell, who might have told her about Munro if he’d bothered to tip that ridiculous hat in her direction.

Will glanced at Nell as if for moral support, then started to say something, only to sigh and rub his neck. “Harry... Curse it, man. Don’t you read the papers?”

“I only just woke up an hour ago, and when I looked at the clock, it was all I could do to get myself dressed and presentable before Phil came to collect me for our match. Every Saturday afternoon, we play against...” He trailed off, looking back and forth between Nell and Will. If she appeared half as somber as he did, Harry had to know something was seriously amiss.

Will said, “I’m afraid I’ve some bad news for you, old man—really bad news.”

Harry just stared at his brother, his eyes glassy and a little too fixed, the hat clutched in one hand, bat in the other.

Nell turned away, crossed to the window, and gazed out at the houses across the street, wishing she were somewhere else, anywhere but here.

Quietly Will said, “There was an...incident, yesterday afternoon. Munro...he was found out there on the front steps. It would appear—“

“What?
What do you mean, ‘he was found’? Is he hurt? Sick?”

“He fell from that window,” Will said. “I’m sorry, Harry. He’s dead.”

There came a pause of several long seconds, then Harry said, “You son of a bitch, what are you trying to—”

“Harry, you need to listen to—”

“And you need to kiss my ass. I don’t know what you’re trying to—”

“He’s dead, Harry. I autopsied him myself.”

“Liar!
You’re a goddamn liar! He can’t have just fallen from that window. Look at it! You’d have to
climb out
of the damn thing. You couldn’t just
fall.”

Nell leaned on the window sill and closed her eyes, wishing she could close her ears to Harry’s pain, because it was the last thing she wanted to hear. Not that it should trouble her; she should revel in it, after what he’d done to her. But she wasn’t made that way, nor did she care to be.

In a voice shaky with emotion, Harry said, “This has something to do with that uppity little bit of cheap Irish lace over there. She put you up to—”

“Harry,” Will growled in his warning tone.

“She’s got your cherry splitter in a vise, you know that, don’t you? She’s just leading you around by your—”

Nell flinched at the sound of Will’s fist striking his brother’s face, squeezed her eyes shut as Harry landed with a grunt and a torrent of curses on the carpeted floor.

“My sympathy only extends so far,” Will said in a softly strained voice. “You will leave Miss Sweeney out of this conversation.”

Harry muttered something unintelligible, his breath coming in tremulous pants. He sniffed, coughed, sniffed again.

Nell turned to find him sitting up on the floor, holding a handkerchief to the side of his mouth. His tawny hair hung over his forehead, and his left cheek bore a scrape surrounded by a livid bruise. He tried to glare at her, but his eyes were wet and his face blood-flushed, which somewhat compromised the effect.

Will met Nell’s gaze with a wretched expression; this was no easier for him than for her.

Sitting Indian-style on the floor, Harry dug an engraved silver flask from inside his coat and unscrewed it one-handed, which looked to be a practiced maneuver. Removing the blood-stained handkerchief from his mouth, he tilted the flask and took a long pull, wincing at the sting of alcohol on his split lip. Harry gulped as if it were water, his hand trembling. He wiped his mouth with the handkerchief, gasping, then raised the flask again and emptied it.

He shook his head as he screwed the top back on the flask. “What happened?” he rasped.

Will said, “The police think he committed suicide.”

“Mullet-headed pigs,” Harry muttered as he dabbed the handkerchief on his mouth, his gaze unfocused. His voice seemed a little thick-tongued; the drink, perhaps, or his swollen mouth, or perhaps both. “Why would a man like Phil Munro kill himself? He had everything. He was...” He ducked his head, the bloody handkerchief pressed to his mouth, his shoulders quaking.

Nell wrapped her arms around herself and looked down.

Will said his brother’s name softly.

Harry’s muffled sobs were excruciating to listen to.

“Harry.” Will hiked up his trousers and crouched next to his brother. “Harry, I’m sorry for your—“

“Go to hell!”
Harry lashed out with his fists, catching Will on the side of the head. He grabbed his cricket bat and leapt to his feet. “You’re not sorry for anything!”

He swung the bat as Will was rising; Will ducked before it could connect. “Harry, for pity’s sake!”

Harry spun around and whipped the bat across the big oak desk, sweeping papers across the room, along with the crystal inkwell, which cracked against the wall, splattering ink all over the luxurious silk wallpaper.

“Harry!” Will yelled as he gained his feet.

Nell backed up swiftly as Harry took the bat to the étagère, shattering the glass shelves as he sent Munro’s cricket trophies flying. “Don’t you tell me you’re sorry, damn you!” he screamed as she smashed the glass on a row framed prints. “You’re not—“

“Stop this!” Will grabbed the bat as Harry raised it overhead, wresting it from it grip. “For God’s sake, Harry.”

“Stop telling me what to do!”
Red-faced and wild-eyed, Harry wheeled toward the table with the architectural drawings as Nell stumbled out of his way. He seized a rolled-up plan and tore it in half, then grabbed one of the paperweights and hurled it at his brother.

Will sidestepped the glass sphere, bunting it away rather deftly with the bat as Harry closed his fist around another.

“Oh, my God.”

Harry stilled at the faint words from the doorway, the paperweight raised to throw. Catherine Munro, pale as chalk, stood with her hands clasped at her throat, surveying the carnage Harry had made of the room she’d meant to keep forever untouched. “Oh, dear God.” She closed one hand around the locket housing her late brother’s portrait, the other over her mouth.

Harry stared at her, wet-faced, his chest pumping, a trickle of blood coursing down his chin from the split lip. He blinked at Catherine, then at the room around him. He seemed to wilt; the paperweight thudded onto the floor.

“Miss Munro...” Nell began. As she was pondering what to say next, Harry bolted across the room, muscled Catherine aside, and tore down the stairwell, his footsteps reverberating through the house.

*   *   *

“There he is.” Will, walking arm in arm with Nell in the Public Garden, pointed to the far side of the lake, where a lone figure sat slumped over on a bench, elbows on knees. From this distance, Nell would have taken him for an old man, were it not for that garishly striped jacket.

After Harry’s abrupt departure, she’d watched from the window of Munro’s office as he jogged east on Marlborough Street. He slowed down as he approached the park. Harry had always liked the Public Garden, Will had said. Idyllic in the manner of an English country estate, it was one of his favorite trysting places.

Harry lifted his head as they approached, squinting against the midday sunshine. His posture remained the same, as did his expression of drained resignation. He was hatless, his well-oiled hair in disarray, a crust of blood drying on his lower lip, that abraded bruise on his cheekbone purpling already.

He offered no objection when Will sat beside him on the bench. Nell, knowing better than to force him to interact with her, chose the next bench over—close enough to hear what was said, but far enough away so that Harry could dismiss her from his mind if he chose to.

From inside his morning coat, Will retrieved his own flask, which was oval-shaped and about half the size of Harry’s, and offered it to his brother. “Brandy,” Will said. “Not your poison of choice, I know, but...”

Harry took it and sat upright to swallow its contents in a single tilt. He returned it to Will, sat back, and scrubbed his hands over his face, flinching when he touched the contusion on his cheek.

“Sorry about that,” Will said, “but you were begging for it.

Harry just stared, rheumy-eyed, at the breeze-riffled surface of the water. A young nursemaid was wheeling a perambulator down the walk that surrounded the lake; otherwise, this area of the park was remarkably empty for such a fine, sunny day. He felt around inside his coat, muttered something under his breath, and said wearily, “Forgot my cigars.”

Will pulled a tin of Bull Durhams from his coat and flipped it open. “Just don’t let the gendarmes catch you smoking out here.”

Harry slid a cigarette out of the tin and looked at it. “You have the nerve to call
me
a ditch-digger?” Indeed, when Nell first met William Hewitt a year and a half ago, he was the only wellborn gentleman she’d ever seen with a cigarette in his hand.

Will took out his match safe and lit his brother’s cigarette. He didn’t take one himself, which surprised Nell. If any situation called for an “inhalable nerve tonic,” it seemed to her it would be this one.

Harry drew on the cigarette, gagging. “Tastes like shit.”

Will’s gaze flicked in Nell’s direction. Knowing his instinct would be to upbraid his brother for swearing in her presence, she caught his eye and shook her head. It was better that she should remain on the periphery—seen from the corner of Harry’s eye, perhaps, but not heard.

“It’s probably stale,” Will said. “I’ve been carrying that tin around for a while.”

Harry smoked the cigarette down to a stub, asked for another, and lit it off the first. “So, what
were
you doing at Phil’s?” he asked.

“Trying to figure out how he died.”

“I thought you said he killed himself.”

“The police said he killed himself. He didn’t.”

Harry turned to look at his brother for the first time.

Will said, “He was attacked from behind, possibly with one of his own antique cricket mallets. The cause of death was a fractured skull. His assailant then pitched him out the window to make it look like suicide.”

Harry returned his gaze to the lake, puffing thoughtfully on the cigarette. “I knew he couldn’t have...” He shook his head. “Not a man like that. Never.”

“At first, we thought he might have been ruined when gold collapsed, but that’s not the case. We know he bought millions of dollars worth of it over the summer, when it was a bull market, on behalf of himself and the men he advised. But he dumped it yesterday morning, right before word arrived in the Gold Room that President Grant would be selling four million in federal gold, which was when all hell broke loose.”

“And when everyone else who owned gold got trounced,” Harry said. “He’s a clever bastard. Was. Must have made a pretty penny yesterday.”

Not so Noah Bassett, whose $50,000 in borrowed money went to buy gold that Munro chose not to sell, leaving the poor old fellow ruined—a wrinkle that Will wisely chose to withhold from his brother at the present time.

“If I’m to prove Munro was murdered,” Will said, “I need information. That’s why I was in his office. And that’s why I’d like to talk to you. You were his best friend. You might know things about him that others didn’t.”